There's nothing new

October 13, 2005 | Comments

I thought I'd blogged this when I first saw it (and hey maybe I had), but a conversation with Mark yesterday brought up this photo which I took earlier this year at the Bradford Museum of Photography. It's a series of 1920s Cameras For Girls but what struck me was the ipoddity of these hand-crafted beauties...

Set Your Priorities

October 13, 2005 | Comments

Set Your Priorities: "Once again, it's really messy, it's not exact, and it doesn't matter. You're not making a schedule today: you're just prioritizing. "

I-Mode in the UK

October 13, 2005 | Comments

I saw this advert on the tube yesterday. By Christ it scared me. Have they learned nothing from the Silver Surfer?

Even if I-mode is "faster than WAP", does this really matter? Does associating I-mode with WAP generate any sort of resonance with customers? Are the public at large sitting at home desperately wishing that WAP were faster? I think not.

Coincidentally, yesterday I paid a visit to some chums in Slough and saw I-mode for the first time, and it looks very interesting. I can't put my finger on why - the whole just seems like more than the sum of it's parts. And they've managed to get a decent-looking handset out of NEC, which is massively impressive too.

I'm NDAd so can't talk about one of the aspects of it that really got me excited, but the I-Mail product - which I believe will let content providers message I-mode customers using email and avoiding per-message charges - knocks aside one of the fundamental assumptions us mobile folks make when we're thinking of services and opens up a whole raft of opportunities.

Even if I-mode itself doesn't generate massive subscriber levels, it might push the rest of the UK mobile industry in the right direction.

League Against Tedium

October 13, 2005 | Comments

The League Against Tedium: "People rarely listen to what I say. I do not expect them to. One cannot expect dwarves to queue for the rack."

Why convergence leads to value dilution

October 11, 2005 | Comments

I'm not sure I buy this (too many buzzwords for me - "synergizing the application and hardware to maximize user value" indeed!), but it's an interesting argument: "The convergence of diverse services dilutes the focus on each service, thus leaving it to struggle."

So, stepping back from the grand strategies and focusing on more tactical stuff... how do you ensure that an increasingly multipurpose device doesn't end up as a jack of all trades, master of none? Or (he says, eyeing the PC suspiciously) does it matter if it does?